App lets you pay pals by bumping iPhones

latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-bump-pay-iphone-app-20120329,0,4681787.story
latimes.com
App lets you pay pals by bumping iPhones

By Michelle Maltais

5:35 PM PDT, March 29, 2012
Advertisement
Click here to find out more!

If your buddy owes you money, lacking cash is no excuse if he's got an iPhone.
Just like sending contact information with the Bump app, you can now transfer money the same way with Bump Pay. The free app asks for your email address when it's initially opened. You and your iPhone-wielding friend bump hands; when you feel the vibration, the money's a-moving.

The money will be associated with the email address you enter. If that one doesn't have a PayPal account associated with it, PayPal will send you an email to prompt you to create an account to get your money. (You can't set up a PayPal account within this app.)

If you have your checking account linked to PayPal, there are no fees for the transfer of funds. If your credit card is what's linked, there is a fee.

Unlike Venmo -- which is for iOS, Android, computers and any phone with SMS -- Bump Pay uses PayPal exclusively and is available only for iOS devices in the U.S. Other payment platforms could be available in the future, Bump CEO David Lieb told Mashable.

Originally, the app was a tool created for members of the Bump team to help split the check for lunch, according to Mashable.

Now, if you win the Mega Millions jackpot or have some other reason to move big money around, just know you'll have to limit yourself to payments of less than $1,000 with this app.

RELATED:
Comedy Central app highlights election humor

Mega Millions: 5 things to do with apps if you win

OnStar rolls out Family Link, allows families to track each other

Follow Michelle Maltais on Google+, Facebook or Twitter

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

korea e-books schools resistance

In South Korean classrooms, digital textbook revolution meets some resistance
By Chico Harlan, Published: March 24

SEOUL — Five years ago, South Korea mapped out a plan to transform its education system into the world’s most cutting-edge. The country would turn itself into a “knowledge powerhouse,” one government report declared, breeding students “equipped for the future.” These students would have little use for the bulky textbooks familiar to their parents. Their textbooks would be digital, accessible on any screen of their choosing. Their backpacks would be much lighter.

By setting out to swap traditional textbooks for digital ones, the chief element of its plan for transformation, South Korea tried to anticipate the future — and its vision has largely taken shape with the global surge of tablets, smartphones and e-book readers.

But South Korea, among the world’s most wired nations, has also seen its plan to digitize elementary, middle and high school classrooms by 2015 collide with a trend it didn’t anticipate: Education leaders here worry that digital devices are too pervasive and that this young generation of tablet-carrying, smartphone-obsessed students might benefit from less exposure to gadgets, not more.

Those concerns have caused South Korea to pin back the ambition of the project, which is in a trial stage at about 50 schools. Now, the full rollout won’t be a revolution: Classes will use digital textbooks alongside paper textbooks, not instead of them. First- and second-graders, government officials say, probably won’t use the gadgets at all.

The newest thinking, in the eyes of some education experts here, calls into question South Korea’s long-held tenet that technology automatically brings progress. The JoongAng Ilbo, one of Seoul’s major daily newspapers, warned in an editorial about the country’s “exaggerated trust” in digital education and the wrongful assumption that wireless education means better quality.

Other countries are watching closely, because no other nation, according to government officials here, has a similarly ambitious digital plan. The nearest comparison might be in Florida, where officials last year proposed phasing out traditional textbooks by 2015.

But South Korea’s education system has long been known for pushing the limits. It is among the world’s most demanding: Most students meet with private tutors or attend cram schools. Parents obsess over their kids’ achievement. South Korea has among the world’s highest literacy levels and highest private education spending.

“The concern about the digital textbook,” said Kwon Cha-mi, who runs the digital program at one of the pilot elementary schools in Seoul, “is that young students won’t have as much time to experience real life and real things. They’ll just see the whole world through a computer screen.”

At first glance, some of the trepidation sounds like the typical concerns of an older generation that doesn’t understand the new. But South Korean students are showing the downside of uber-stimulation.

About one in 12 students between ages 5 and 9, according to a government survey, is addicted to the Internet, meaning they become anxious or depressed if they go without access. Some experts suggest a similar problem in the United States, where between 8 percent and 12 percent of children show signs of Internet addiction, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Education officials here fear that if tablets and laptops become mandatory in the classroom, students could become even more device-dependent. They might also suffer from vision problems. Some parents, officials say, have expressed the concern that their kids will struggle to keep their focus on studying when using an Internet-connected device.

Before making a complete transition to digital books, the government should study the “health effects” on students, said Jeong Kwang-hoon, chief of the online learning division at the Korea Education and Research Information Service, a government-sponsored institute that is working with private companies to create digital textbooks.

Scaled-down ambitions

South Korea’s education ministry never said explicitly that paper textbooks would disappear. But the 2007 plan spoke in sweeping terms about “overcoming the limit” of traditional learning, so education experts here assumed as much.

Only last summer did the government unveil the specifics. South Korea said it would introduce the first set of e-textbooks nationwide by 2015 at the latest. The content would be accessible on any device — on tablets or laptops, in classrooms or at home, on Apples or Samsungs, the homegrown electronics company whose rise corresponds with Korea’s economic emergence. But the plan was scaled back, too, with officials saying paper textbooks still need a prime place in classrooms.

“There have been some changes in ambition,” said Ra Eun-jong, the deputy director of textbook planning at the education ministry. “In some way, paper and digital textbooks will be used together. But we still haven’t figured out the best mix. . . . It might just depend on the teacher’s personal style.”

Students in classes using digital textbooks — at the beginning, they might be used only for a few subjects, such as science and social studies — will be able to retrieve their homework from a “cloud” computing network, the education ministry says. Conceivably, they will be able to access their homework in any place with Internet service or cellphone service; they could even finish up their assignments on their smartphones while riding Seoul’s subway, where the service network reaches underground.

At least 10 South Korean publishing companies are building digital textbooks. The crudest versions are much like copied pages of a traditional textbook; the pages are digital, but you can’t play around with them. The more advanced versions, though, are packed with 3-D animation and video clips. There’s also the possibility that the textbooks can be updated in real-time — although textbooks here are government-approved, and any changes would require a bureaucratic review.

Most of these publishing companies have their background in traditional textbooks, and for the moment, their developers find themselves torn between an old model and a new one. Despite higher upfront development costs, e-textbooks, stripped of the costly printing process, are typically cheaper than traditional ones. South Korea’s government has always insisted on affordable textbooks, unlike in the United States, where the market is more lucrative (South Korea’s paperbound textbooks cost about $9). But the fear among publishers is that the move to e-textbooks will cause the entire industry to shrink.

For now, one publishing executive says, companies are developing e-textbooks only because the shift is inevitable.

A changing classroom

From surveys of the pilot schools, government officials here say digital textbooks help the attitude of students. But there’s no evidence that they help or hurt grades or retention.

Digital textbooks do, though, change the very nature of the classroom. Teachers who embrace the digital textbooks, education experts say, become more like “companions” in the education process, not just lecturing, but also helping students to conduct their own Google searches and to make sense of simulations featured in the e-textbooks.

At Seoul’s Guil Elementary School, where fifth- and sixth-graders participate in the trial, every student in the digital classrooms has a Hewlett-Packard laptop. Students toggle between their digital textbook and the Internet, which they use like an encyclopedia for fact-checking and research.

On this particular day, students are learning about pinhole cameras — a simple device that captures images upside-down.

When teacher Lee Yeon-ji asks her 24 students how the device works, she sends them to the Internet.

“I think I found something that sounds true,” one student says.

Minutes later, she asks them to double-click on a video, embedded in the digital textbook, illustrating the process. Students watch the video either on their laptops or on a high-definition monitor at the front of the classroom, in place of a chalkboard.

The Guil principal, observing in the back of the classroom, marvels at the way the students follow along, speeding between searches and simulations. “The students are focusing,” Yoon Taek-joong, the principal, says, and that sort of focus requires a digital brain.

“My brains and their brains must be totally different,” Yoon says.

Special correspondent Yoonjung Seo contributed to this report.

© The Washington Post Company

new rules of warfare drones

Cyber and Drone Attacks May Change Warfare More Than the Machine Gun
By Ross Andersen
droneroom_615.jpg

The new look of drone-enabled war. Reuters.

From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age.
We're used to thinking of war as a physical phenomenon, as an outbreak of destructive violence that takes place in the physical world. Bullets fly, bombs explode, tanks roll, people collapse. Despite the tremendous changes in the technology of warfare, it remained a contest of human bodies. But as the drone wars have shown, that's no longer true, at least for one side of the battle.

Technological asymmetry has always been a feature of warfare, but no nation has ever been able to prosecute a war without any physical risk to its citizens. What might the ability to launch casualty-free wars do to the political barriers that stand between peace and conflict? In today's democracies politicians are obligated to explain, at regular intervals, why a military action requires the blood of a nation's young people. Wars waged by machines might not encounter much skepticism in the public sphere.

We just don't know what moral constraints should apply to these new kinds of warfare. Take the ancient, but still influential, doctrine of Just War Theory, which requires that war's destructive forces be unleashed only when absolutely necessary; war is to be pursued only as a last resort and only against combatants, never against civilians.

But information warfare, warfare pursued with information technologies, distorts concepts like "necessity" and "civilian" in ways that challenge these ethical frameworks. An attack on another nation's information infrastructure, for instance, would surely count as an act of war. But what if it reduced the risk of future bloodshed? Should we really only consider it as a last resort? The use of robots further complicates things. It's not yet clear who should be held responsible if and when an autonomous military robot kills a civilian.

These are the questions that haunt the philosophers and ethicists that think deeply about information warfare, and they will only become more pertinent as our information technologies become more sophisticated. Mariarosaria Taddeo, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Hertforshire, recently published an article in Philosophy & Technology called "Information Warfare: A Philosophical Perspective" that addresses these questions and more. What follows is my conversation with Taddeo about how information technology is changing the way we wage war, and what philosophy is doing to catch up.

How do you define information warfare?

Taddeo: The definition of "information warfare" is hotly debated. From my perspective, for the purposes of philosophical analysis, it's best to define information warfare in terms of concrete forms, and then see if there is a commonality between those forms. One example would be cyber-attacks or hacker attacks, which we consider to be information warfare; another example would be the use of drones or semi-autonomous machines. From those instances, to me, a good definition of information warfare is "the use of information communication technologies within a military strategy that is endorsed by a state." And if you go to the Pentagon they will speak about this in different ways, they put it under different headings, in terms of information operations or cyber warfare, cyber attacks, that sort of thing.

Was Russia's attack on Estonia in 2007 the first broad-based state example of this?

Taddeo: The attack on Estonia is certainly one example of it, but it's only one instance, and it's not the first. You could, for example, point to the SWORDS robots that were used in Iraq several years prior to the attack on Estonia, or the use of predator drones, etc. Remember information warfare encompasses more than only information communication technologies used through the web; these technologies can be used in several different domains and in several different ways.

But it's hard to point to a definitive first example of this. It goes back quite a ways and these technologies have been evolving for sometime now; remember that the first Internet protocols were developed by DARPA---in some sense, these technologies were born in the military sphere. Turing himself, the father of computer science, worked mainly within military programs during the Second World War.

Interesting, but do I understand you correctly that you distinguish this new kind of information warfare from pre-internet information technologies like the radio and the telegraph?

Taddeo: Well those are certainly information technologies, and to some extent information has always been an important part of warfare, because we have always wanted to communicate and to destroy our enemies' information structures and communication capabilities. What we want to distinguish here is the use of these new kinds of information communication technologies, because they have proved to be much more revolutionary in their effects on warfare than previous technologies like telegraphs or telephones or radios or walkie-talkies.

What's revolutionary about them is that they have restructured the very reality in which we perceive ourselves as living in, and the way in which we think about the concepts of warfare or the state. Take for example the concept of the state: we currently define a state as a political unit that exercises power over a certain physical territory. But when you consider that states are now trying to also dominate certain parts of cyberspace, our definition becomes problematic because cyberspace doesn't have a defined territory. The information revolution is shuffling these concepts around in really interesting ways from a philosophical perspective, and more specifically, from an ethical perspective.

dronecarry_615.jpg

An Israeli soldier carries a drone. Reuters.

In your paper you mention the use of robotic weapons like drones as one example of the rapid development of information warfare. You note that the U.S. government deployed only 150 robotic weapons in Iraq in 2004, but that number had grown to 12,000 by 2008. Is this a trend you expect to continue?

Taddeo: I expect so. There are several ways that the political decisions to endorse or deploy these machines are encouraged by the nature of these technologies. For one they are quite a bit cheaper than traditional weapons, but more importantly they bypass the need for political actors to confront media and public opinion about sending young men and women abroad to risk their lives. These machines enable the contemplation of military operations that would have previously been considered too dangerous for humans to undertake. From a political and military perspective, the advantages of these weapons outweigh the disadvantages quite heavily.

But there are interesting problems that surface when you use them; for instance, when you have robots fighting a war in a foreign country, the population of that country is going to be slow to gain trust, which can make occupation or even just persuasion quite difficult. You can see this in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the populations have been slower to develop empathy for American forces because they see them as people who send machines to fight a war.

"Populations have been slower to develop empathy for American forces because they see them as people who send machines to fight a war."

But these shortcomings aren't weighty enough to convince politicians or generals to forgo the use of these technologies, and because of that I expect this trend towards the use of robotic weapons will continue.

You note the development of a new kind of robotic weapon, the SGR-A1, which is now being used by South Korea to patrol its border with North Korea. What distinguishes the SGR-A1 from previous weapons of information warfare?

Taddeo: The main difference is that this machine doesn't necessarily have a human operator, or a "man in the loop" as some have phrased it. It can autonomously decide to fire on a target without having to wait for a signal from a remote operator. In the past drones have been tele-operated, or if not, they didn't possess firing ability, and so there was no immediate risk that one of these machines could autonomously harm a human being. The fact that weapons like the SGR-A1 now exist tells us that there are questions that we need to confront. It's wonderful that we're able to save human lives on one side, our side, of a conflict, but the issues of responsibility, the issue of who is responsible for the actions of these semi-autonomous machines remain to be addressed.

Of course it's hard to develop a general rule for these situations where you have human nature filtered through the actions of these machines; it's more likely we're going to need a case-by-case approach. But whatever we do, we want to push as much of the responsibility as we can into the human sphere.

In your paper you say that information warfare is a compelling case of a larger shift toward the non-physical domain brought about by the Information Revolution. What do you mean by that?

Taddeo: It might make things more clear to start with the Information Revolution. The phrase "Information Revolution" is meant to convey the extraordinary ways that information communication technologies have changed our lives. There are of course plenty of examples of this, including Facebook and Twitter and that sort of thing, but what these technologies have really done is introduce a new non-physical space that we exist in, and, increasingly, it's becoming just as important as the offline or physical space---in fact events in this non-physical domain often affect events in the physical world.

Information warfare is one way that you can see the increasing importance of this non-physical domain. For example, we are now using this non-physical space to prove the power of our states---we are no longer only concerned with demonstrating the authority of our states only in the physical world.

In what ways might information warfare increase the risk of conflicts and human casualties?

Taddeo: It's a tricky question, because the risks aren't yet clear, but there is a worry that the number of conflicts around the world could increase because it will be easier for those who direct military attacks with the use of these technologies to do so, because they will not have to endanger the lives of their citizens to do so. As I mentioned before, information warfare is in this sense easier to wage from a political perspective.

It's more difficult to determine the effect on casualties. Information Warfare has the potential to be blood-free, but that's only one potentiality; this technology could just as easily be used to produce the kind of damage caused by a bomb or any other traditional weapon---just imagine what would happen if a cyber-attack was launched against a flight control system or a subway system. These dangerous aspects of information warfare shouldn't be underestimated; the deployment of information technology in warfare scenarios can be highly dangerous and destructive, and so there's no way to properly quantify the casualties that could result. This is one reason why we so badly need a philosophical and ethical analysis of this phenomenon, so that we can properly evaluate the risks.

militaryrecruitment_615.jpg

This is an actual graphic that ran in Airman Magazine, the official magazine of the Air Force.
Part of your conception of information warfare is as an outgrowth of the Information Revolution. You draw on the work of Luciano Floridi, who has said that the Information Revolution is the fourth revolution, coming after the Copernican, Darwinian and the Freudian revolutions, which all changed the way humans perceive themselves in the Universe. Did those revolutions change warfare in interesting ways?

Taddeo: That's an interesting question. I don't think those revolutions had the kind of impact on warfare that we're seeing with the Information Revolution. Intellectual and technological revolutions seem to go hand in hand, historically, but I don't, to use one example, think that the Freudian Revolution had a dramatic effect on warfare. The First World War was waged much like the wars of the 19th century, and to the extent that it wasn't, those changes did not come about because of Freud.

What you find when you study those revolutions is that while they may have resulted in new technologies like the machine gun or the airplane, none of them changed the concept of war. Even the Copernican Revolution, which was similar to the Information Revolution in the sense that it dislocated our sense of ourselves as existing in a particular space and time, didn't have this effect. The concept of war remained intact in the wake of those revolutions, whereas we are finding that the concept of war itself is changing as a result of the Information Revolution.

How has the Information Revolution changed the concept of war?

Taddeo: It goes back to the shift to the non-physical domain; war has always been perceived as something distinctly physical involving bloodshed and destruction and violence, all of which are very physical types of phenomena. If you talk to people who have participated in warfare, historically, they will describe the visceral effects of it---seeing blood, hearing loud noises, shooting a gun, etc. Warfare was, in the past, always something very concrete.

This new kind of warfare is non-physical; of course it can still cause violence, but it can also be computer to computer, or it can be an attack on certain types of information infrastructure and still be an act of war. Consider the Estonian cyber-attack, where you had a group of actors launching an attack on institutional websites in Estonia; there were no physical casualties, there was no physical violence involved. Traditional war was all about violence; the entire point of it was to physically overpower your enemy. That's a major change. It shifts the ethical analysis, which was previously focused only on minimizing bloodshed. But when you have warfare that doesn't lead to any bloodshed, what sort of ethical framework are you going to apply?

"When you have warfare that doesn't lead to any bloodshed, what sort of ethical framework are you going to apply?"

For some time now, Just War Theory has been one of the main ethical frameworks for examining warfare. You seem to argue that its modes of analysis break down when applied to information warfare. For instance, you note that the principle that war ought only to be pursued "as a last resort" may not apply to information warfare. Why is that?

Taddeo: Well first I would say that as an ethical framework Just War Theory has served us well up to this point. It was first developed by the Romans, and from Aquinas on many of the West's brightest minds have contributed to it. It's not that it needs to be discarded; quite the contrary, there are some aspects of it that need to be kept as guiding principles going forward. Still, it's a theory that addresses warfare as it was known historically, as something very physical.

The problem with the principle of "last resort" is that while, yes, we want physical warfare to be the last choice after everything else, it might not be the case that information warfare is to be a "last resort," because it might actually prevent bloodshed in the long run. Suppose that a cyber-attack could prevent traditional warfare from breaking out between two nations; by the criteria of Just War Theory it would be an act of war and thus only justifiable as a last resort. And so you might not want to apply the Just War framework to warfare that is not physically violent.

You also note that the distinction between combatants and civilians is blurred in information warfare, and that this also has consequences for Just War Theory, which makes liberal use of that distinction. How so?

Taddeo: Well until a century ago there was a clear-cut distinction between the military and civilians---you either wear a uniform or you don't, and if you do, you are a justifiable military target. This distinction has been eroded over time, even prior to the Information Revolution; civilians took part in a number of twentieth century conflicts. But with information warfare the distinction is completely gone; not only can a regular person wage information warfare with a laptop, but also a computer engineer working for the U.S. government or the Russian government can participate in information warfare all day long and then go home and have dinner with his or her family, or have a beer at the pub.

The problem is, if we don't have any criteria, any way of judging who is involved in a war and who is not, then how do we respond? Who do we target? The risk is that our list of targets could expand to include people who we would now consider civilians, and that means targeting them with physical warfare, but also with surveillance, and that could be very problematic. Surveillance is a particularly thorny issue here, because if we don't know who we have to observe, we may end up scaling up our surveillance efforts to encompass entire populations and that could have very serious effects in the realm of individual rights.

You have identified the prevention of information entropy as a kind of first principle in an ethical framework that can be applied to information warfare---is that right, and if so, does that supplant the saving of human life as our usual first principle for thinking about these things?

Taddeo: I think they are complimentary. First of all, a clarification is in order. Information entropy has nothing to do with physics or information theory; it's not a physical or mathematical concept. Entropy here refers to the destruction of informational entities, which is something we don't want. It could be anything from destroying a beautiful painting, to launching a virus that damages information infrastructure, and it can also be killing a human being. Informational entities are not only computers; informational entities identify all existing things, seen from an informational perspective. In this sense an action generating entropy in the universe is an action that destroys, damages or corrupts a beautiful painting or damages information infrastructures, and it can also be killing a human being. Any action that makes the information environment worse off generates entropy and therefore is immoral. In this sense the prevention of information entropy is consistent with the saving of human life, because human beings contribute a great deal to the infosphere---killing a human being would generate a lot of information entropy.

This is all part of a wider ethical framework called Information Ethics, mainly developed by Luciano Floridi. Information Ethics ascribes a moral stance to all existing things. It does not have an ontological bias, that is to say it doesn't privilege certain sorts of beings. This does not mean that according to Information Ethics all things have the 'same' moral value but rather that they 'share' some common minimal rights and deserve some minimal respect. Here, the moral value of a particular entity would be proportional to its contributions to the information environment. So a white paper with one dot on it would have less moral value than say a book of poems, or a human being. That's one way of thinking about this.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/cyber-and-drone-attacks-may-change-warfare-more-than-the-machine-gun/254540/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.